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Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

thebluehouse.io

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Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#111

Post by bdcravens »

mathattack wrote: post #85
mironathetin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around …" I think it is a business by itself: you pay for your exotic startup location. What we just read is a travel agency that focuses on startups. I agree with atmosx, that towns are better suited for startups. When we worked on our startup many years ago, one of the largest obstacles for investors was the location: a mid size sleepy t…

Yes - they're talking their book. Which would survive a VC funding round better: Two startups with a similar very far fetched idea - one asks for $10mm to continue in the valley, the other $5mm in Morocco?

The valley one, but odds are it'd burn through the cash faster.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#112

Post by toomuchtodo »

patio11 wrote: post #38
atmosx wrote: post #6

Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around: You want to be a big city because you can find clients (users), meet people (e.g. possible investors) and generally speaking do any sort of networking that would be otherwise impossible. The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach. I totally understand that this is a drea…

I have a new appreciation for the advantages of being in a big city since moving to Tokyo recently. That said, my while I'm an occasional visitor in Silicon Valley I hold a passport from Bootstrapistan, and most of its population resides in the capital city of A Small Town In The Middle of Nowhere. [+] A representative sampling of locations of the "head office" from small software businesses that I'm socially close t…

> Why? Interesting question. Some days I think this is just a pure coincidence and some days I think that the low implied burn rate for the founders and generally low opportunity costs makes it easier for the business to hit both pro-forma profitability and "successfully outcompetes best available alternatives on the local labor market" profitability.

I've always thought that when I was ready to bootstrap my own startup, I'd do it from a rural farm property. You can fly to meet whomever you need to face to face for networking, and with extremely low costs of living, your run rate is close (but not quite) to zero.

Thanks for confirming my thought!

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#113

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I have to point out that:

1) Traditionally, HN has been about startups: what works, what doesn't work

2) This entire comment thread is reading like a tourism forum

At some point, maybe 2-4 years ago, HN sublty starting moving from a board about how to make your startup to folks trying to pitch other folks on stuff to buy for your startup. It's the old thing about during the gold rush the gold miners didn't make all the money -- the guys selling pickaxes did.

I don't say that to discount these folks. Hell if I know. Probably best place in the world for a startup. It's just every now and then HN gets especially bad about this. And it needs to be pointed out.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#114

Post by lelele »

maaku wrote: post #87
lelele wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day it doesn't matter where you are. I think that it matters, instead. Unless you are one of those people who are oblivious to their surroundings. You are not going to code 24/7. And when you will have done your share of coding for the day, or even if you would just like to take a break, then being in a nice place will help you to recharge yourself.

Some people consider small fishing villages to be nice places.

And I didn't mean otherwise. "Nice place" meant "whatever feels nice to you".

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#115

Post by Fuzzwah »

arethuza wrote: post #31
binarymax wrote: post #10

For those of you in the UK/London - and want somewhere cheap and amazing to code in your own back yard, I highly recommend Hastings/St Leonards. It is (or was) a 'small fishing village' that retains a fascinating history. 1.5 hours from London, and 1 hour from Brighton, 1/3 the cost of flats and working space, good connection speeds, good coffee. If you come down to check it out, look me up and I'll buy you a pint. -…

I can recommend my home village in North East Scotland for everything apart from convenient access to London. Not sure about internet speeds or whether they have coffee yet. But certainly pretty, peaceful, cheap property, great scenery and fairly convenient for the Cairngorms for climbing/skiing: http://www.portknockiewebsite.co.uk/ For a bit of history, here is a page describing the loss of my great-grandfathers boa…

My curiosity was peaked by a URL which actually had the word website in it. I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of yellow and black animated gifs of workmen digging.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#117

Post by tjradcliffe »

mironathetin wrote: post #79
atmosx wrote: post #6

Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around: You want to be a big city because you can find clients (users), meet people (e.g. possible investors) and generally speaking do any sort of networking that would be otherwise impossible. The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach. I totally understand that this is a drea…

"Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around …" I think it is a business by itself: you pay for your exotic startup location. What we just read is a travel agency that focuses on startups. I agree with atmosx, that towns are better suited for startups. When we worked on our startup many years ago, one of the largest obstacles for investors was the location: a mid size sleepy t…

Same experience here. Investors like to be close to their money. Being in a city that is easy traveling distance from a major international airport hub means that any investor in the world is one plane flight away. being one short hop beyond that means the number of available investors becomes limited to the people who are very local.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#118

Post by davidw »

patio11 wrote: post #38
atmosx wrote: post #6

Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around: You want to be a big city because you can find clients (users), meet people (e.g. possible investors) and generally speaking do any sort of networking that would be otherwise impossible. The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach. I totally understand that this is a drea…

I have a new appreciation for the advantages of being in a big city since moving to Tokyo recently. That said, my while I'm an occasional visitor in Silicon Valley I hold a passport from Bootstrapistan, and most of its population resides in the capital city of A Small Town In The Middle of Nowhere. [+] A representative sampling of locations of the "head office" from small software businesses that I'm socially close t…

Small town in Italy? If you're talking about Balsamiq and Peldi, near as I can tell, he/they are in Bologna:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna

I suppose that compared to Tokyo, most anything could be considered a small town, but in Italy, Bologna isn't.

Quibbling about details aside, I think your point is a good one, although I also believe there are definitely two sides to it. The case made in this book is convincing that cities are a lot better for the sort of "spontaneous idea contamination" that can lead to big things:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0...

Things get even more complicated when families come into the picture: a beach town in Morocco is not my own idea of the place I'd like to live with mine, although I certainly wouldn't mind an extended vacation there.

There are a lot of things I don't care for about my hometown in Oregon (THE WEATHER!), but I do find that I'm pretty partial to the mid-sized (which for me is something like 100K-400K, depending on various factors) university town like that where I grew up. I like being able to chat with people about programming over drinks from time to time, or talk about business, or have a variety of local businesses. On the other hand, with a family and not wanting to work for a BigCo, I'm not really interested in big cities any more.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#119

Post by agentultra »

dysoco wrote: post #110
agentultra wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be surrounded by thousands of people at any moment who all have headphones on and keep their gaze at a 45 degree angle towards the ground. You too can walk past homeless panhandlers asking for money and ignore them. You can hang out at hip dive-bars and pretend to be cool until the neighborhood gentrifies and you have to commute farther out to the next spot. You can sit next to the schizophrenic on the bus…

As I said, it depends. Right now I'm young and eager to go work at a big company or a startup. Maybe 30 years from now I'll just want to come back and rest, who knows?

We humans are terrible at imagining the future. Might as well seize the day and find out. You might like the city! I know I did when I was young. I still do and couldn't imagine living in a remote, rural town. However I've learned to appreciate remote, rural living more and like to visit it for periods of time.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#120

Post by mr_luc »

dysoco wrote: post #91

I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out. I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day. If I wanted…

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup!

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well. It was rainy during nearly half of the year, but I didn't even need a wetsuit, and during the good season, it put a smil

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.

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